Oh, then to your last point the poem arises because of the presence of
the dead.  The absence isn't incomprehensible.  Everyone is dead.  As
is the speaker -- and dead to the dead.  Maybe.  My reader -- the one
usually encountered in fantasy -- reads and believes and then, I hope,
is embarrassed in that belief.  But mostly I imagine that it is read
and believed and, then leaves some uneasiness.

This utterance arising in the presence of the dead, at least,
indicates the banality of it all.  But it also, for me at least,
honors what is (maybe) under that banality.  That is, for
example...the reference to guys named Spider, Bullethead ... there
drinking in the driveway, what is said...that's real, real "names" and
to me, having been in their presence, knowing how (to put it bluntly)
they have been fucked up by that (real) war, and how they have done
everything (or had everything done to them) to make it all into a
movie and how they were implicated and also wondering  if that was all
that was there and resisting the notion that there is not some remnant
that could speak otherwise, their presence embodies banality but --
just by being there-- points to, maybe, something beyond all that.

In the same way the poem points to something (maybe) beyond all that.
It, at least, for me, breaks with the usual utterances -- a final turn
to an outside, a way to break out of that...I don't know.  What the
hell did Shakespeare do with the fool in Lear?  Where is he?  I want
to know.

Ara Killijian

Ara Killijian read William Saroyan
But nobody ever caught him.
"Just a book I have."
We all need our secrets -- or needed anyway
Stuck there between the First Cav
(Napalm in the morning!)
And the 2nd Armored Division --
Actually commanded by George Patton Jr.

So we understood when Ara went crazy.
And walked around everywhere
Arms outstretched like the crucified Christ
Asking everybody "What is the number one?"

It was, at least, original but
He would get in your way
When you were, for example, smoking
In the Buddha garden thoughtfully provided
by Major Moore.  Buddhas looted from who cares.

"What is the number one?"
"Shut the hell up, Killijian.  Take it someplace else."

So we were somewhat startled when
He jumped off the top of the barracks
And got killed.

"He really was crazy," we said.
And I remember Jim Linden said
"I wonder what the number one really is?"
Flicked his cigarette to the ground
And went to the movies.


On Nov 8, 2007 5:23 PM, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Joe:
>
> An interesting response. Thank you.
>
> <snip>
> No, the mistake you seem to me to be making is assuming that otherness is a
> presence.
> <snip>
>
> Otherness seems to me all that lies outside the compass of the subject:
> incomprehensible presence, but incomprehensible absence as well. Rachel
> Whiteread's casts involve the latter.
>
> <snip>
> The "distancing" in the poem is exactly what needs to be foregrounded to
> overcome the false sincerity that presumes to speak of the other
> <snip>
>
> That which I'd called 'conflictual space' seems to me what's important. So
> we agree about 'false sincerity' and about funny voiced ventriloquism. But
> Whiteread is banal (if I am right that she is) because although alterity
> shapes her work, quite literally, in its absence, that is _all_ there is:
> the shape. It fails one of my canary tests, which is loss of control: hers
> with respect to the work, and mine with respect to the work. As a result she
> comes across as rather a one trick pony.
>
> <snip>
> First of all, given just how these things are read it's quite a leap to
> assume the "embarrassment" of the reader.  But you are right to assume that
> they should suffer it.
> <snip>
>
> I may be misreading you here. At any rate I'm unclear exactly what you are
> saying. My point was that 'Piss off, reader. Leave me alone,' had been on
> the cards for some time, making the ending unsurprising.
>
> <snip>
> And it is precisely because the poem pushes against this and then refuses
> the solace of "the speaking subject" that it is the truest way I have been
> able to write about an absence that should be a presence but can never be
> except as an absence.
> <snip>
>
> What I said was that 'someone Vietnamese' could not become 'a speaking
> subject' in your piece. 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' doesn't open a
> soliloquy, let alone a conversation. It's an utterance which arises through
> the presence of the urn (define the words themselves as a spell or piece of
> sententiousness or whatever) rather as this email might say to you,
> 'Walker's a pompous prat,' simply through its presence and its manner. This
> sort of speaking isn't the ventriloquial sort referred to above, in other
> words, but it is the speaking I meant.
>
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'Listen people, I don't know how you expect to ever stop the
> war if you can't sing any better than that'
> - Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock 1969
>



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